by Tim O'Brien
Once he saw a deer. He did not exactly see it. He saw through it and beyond it, the form registered, and he passed by. Then he saw it. He stopped and turned, and it was a white-tailed doe. The forelegs were splayed, delicate as though of brittle bamboo. It stood deep in snow, twenty yards away, its nose pressed against a birch trunk. He was startled to see it. He stood very still. The doe was brown and speckled white and the nose was black and the ears perked and large, as big as the snout, and the eyes were watchful, and the belly and tail and legs were cream white. It was unexpected. Without thinking, he called to it as if calling a dog for petting. The doe looked at him oddly. Then she arched her back, raising her head to reach higher bark, all the while watching him. She was frail and hungry-looking. In greeting, Perry called again and raised one of his poles. He was struck by the desire to hail the beast, and he called once again and the doe continued to watch. Her eyes were cautious but not unfriendly. Then the wind changed. The doe’s head jerked and held for a moment in a sharp, electric pose of perfect alertness, and then it bolted, and Perry realized they’d never met, and the doe was gone. He reminded himself to tell Grace of the fine doe.
When half the dull day ended, they stopped and made a small fire and had coffee. He told Harvey about the deer.
Harvey nodded. “That’s how it can be.”
“Then the wind changed.”
“That’s how it goes,” Harvey said. “You know that deer are close to being blind?”
“Is that right?”
“It’s in the nose and ears. Those big ears and that long nose.”
“I swear it was watching me.”
Harvey shook his head.
“I swear it.”
Harvey kicked out the fire. Perry drained his coffee cup and stashed it in his rucksack and got ready. “How are we doing?”
“Fine. Made seven miles maybe. Maybe more. At least we’re moving and that’s the big thing. With luck we can maybe make it to the shore highway before dark. I’m pretty sure. Are you worried?”
“Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I guess I am. Yes.”
Harvey laughed. “Smart man, then. But really I think we’re all right. I was awake before dawn and watched where the first light came from, so I know we’re headed southeast. Mostly east. For all I know we’re headed right back into Grand Marais. Don’t worry.”
“I guess it won’t help to worry.”
“That’s the ticket,” Harvey said. “In the war … some very sensitive guys. They were good guys but they worried and they were bad soldiers. They were smart to worry. Had the good sense to worry. But they were awful bad soldiers.”
“Did you worry, Harv?”
“About what?”
“That answers it.”
“No, about what?”
“Did you worry about … having your eye ruined. I don’t know. About getting shot in the nose or something. Whatever. Ghastly things.”
“Did I worry? Yes, I worried.” Harvey buckled on his skis. “Sure. Like when you cut open a fish and you’re kind of scared about seeing the insides. It’s because the fish never thought about them but they were there all along. It was the same. Hard to say. It wasn’t the pain I was scared of. I think it was that I wanted to … react right when my legs got blown off or my chest got shot open or something, you understand, seeing the stuff inside and not going crazy bananas. I used to worry some about that, but not a lot. I didn’t want to bawl like a baby.”
“What about your eye?”
“My eye, yes. Yes, I don’t remember that much.”
“It must have hurt.”
“I suppose. That’s what I don’t remember. If I don’t remember, I guess that means it didn’t hurt much. You care about this, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“Yeah, I see that.” His palm passed to his nose in a precise gesture of dismissal. “You’re a good brother anyway. I’m not much of a fine brother, am I? I do certain things and you do certain things and here we are together at last. Not much. It’s actually too bad we weren’t better brothers before.”
“Well, we were different ages.”
“Yeah.”
“Different friends and everything.”
“Right.”
“I guess we know each other better now.”
“I guess. It’s still a crime,” said Harvey. “Talking about it and so on.”
“It should have been more like me and the deer.”
Harvey smiled as if into a flash camera. “Yes,” he smiled. He clapped Perry on the back. “That’s it,” he said smiling, “right on the button.” He clapped Perry’s shoulder. “Let’s get going before we have a fight and ruin it. Someday we’ll get on a train for Africa. Would you like to go to Africa?”
“Not much, Harv.”
“Where then? Name it.”
“Paris maybe.”
“What the devil is in Paris?”
“Nothing, I guess. Some cafés and people and Notre Dame and things.”
“Okay,” Harvey nodded, reserving the black judgment in his eyes. “I’ll buy that. Paris. After that, then we’ll go to Africa.” Again he smiled with sympathy. Perry wondered where he’d gone wrong.
It was an afternoon of communication by hand signals. Harvey stopping him with a fist raised.
Starting him with a sweeping overhand motion, a wagon master seeing the way and leading.
Rest, a certain delicate signal.
Traverse, carry through the flat pine country, skirting danger, flanking the tangles that went nowhere. “Up to you, buddy,” said his father way back, not even looking at him, as if knowing beforehand he would not go. “You can sit home here, or you can come with us and we’ll have a fine time, but it’s up to you, buddy.” A communication of spirits. Language an artifact. Language a way to ask for the garbage to be taken out. A communication of tacit compatibility of spirit. “That’s all right, buddy,” no explanations, no sharing of insight, abandoning him as his son the none-elect. And Harvey guided with the same ease. If you saw into the forest, then you saw. If you did not, then you did not. “There’s vision on the one hand and there’s blindness on the other,” was the Kalevalian paraphrase used by his father to organize the Pentateuch sermons of 1962.
Not so perfectly crazy, after all. Effortlessly, Harvey took him deep in. They crossed a lake and it was snowing again. It was snowing in earnest. The lake wind was up, and dunes of snow tumbled along. That tension. It was that long far-back tension, a kind of tugging, a feeling of vast bewilderment and eventual melancholy at not seeing so clearly. The wind of his father, the southern calm of Grace, and all it stood for, not a matter of choice and less a matter of pure inclination, entirely a matter of circumstance, genetic fix, history, events, a long-standing ambivalence or uncertainty, pure open-mindedness. The magnet was in the North Pole, the magnetic pole. Revelation. Some sort of great and magnificent epiphany was what was needed. Some luck. The magnet was in the North Pole and there was shelter in the south. There was a warm deep soft algaed spot somewhere, a stewing brewing simmering place of contentment. Revelation was what was needed. Some rotten luck. He had a hard time moving. The lake wind was dead against him. Harvey’s orange rucksack sometimes disappeared in the eliding, slipping, skip-beat dunes of snow. Perry’s skis no longer slid along so easily. He pushed hard with his poles, kept his face down and out of the direct force of the blowing falling snow, the drifting dunes.
Harvey guided him on. They got off the lake and into some trees, where Perry stopped.
He leaned against his poles, watching Harvey continue into the forest. Perry searched, squinted and peered in another effort to find something warm in the woods, such as a sight or bundle of colors or sounds that would spark dazzling streamers of color and light in the sky, light the forest, an electric dazzling array of lights. He rubbed his mittens over the frozen lenses of his glasses, cleared the steam and looked about.
He looked back at the tumblin
g duned lake. It was behind him now. He could not see to the far shore. He turned and followed after Harvey.
After a time the trees thinned dramatically and the land was ripped into rugged slopes and bluffs.
The snowfall was a snowstorm. The closed, nearsighted feeling of tall timber relaxed, and the snowstorm came in. Harvey stopped and pointed at shriveled old fungus growing on the bole of a birch, nodded meaningfully, and Perry nodded back wondering, and they continued skiing. The clouds were like ordinary viscous glue. Perry ignored them. He followed the patch of orange like religion.
Beyond the slopes and bluffs was more forest.
Perry thought of a cheerful song to sing.
Frosty, the snowman,
Da-da da-da da da-da da
It eluded him.
The forest was older. The trees were giants with mangled thick trunks, clawing boughs and roots that erupted from out of the ground and twisted like serpents under the snow, making the skiing treacherous.
Another cheerful song.
Oh, my name is Kalota
I’m from Minnesota
I rip up the soil with my teeth
I’m big as a bear and I’ll give one a scare
And I ain’t never been touched in my sleep.
Harvey climbed a lonely bluff. He reported lakes ahead, hollering like a crow’s nest sailor. They came to the first of the lakes and crossed through the storm, followed a channel to the second lake, crossed the second unnamed lake, portaged through thick forest, eye-deep in the falling snow, and the earth inclined steadily upwards, peaked and descended towards still a third lake, which they crossed without comment, drifting with the drifts.
There on the far edge of the lake they found a broken dock, six posts frozen solid in the ice, a few broken slats.
“Well!” shouted Harvey against the storm. “Well, now we’ve arrived somewhere.”
Perry looked for smoke.
“We’ve come to someplace,” shouted Harvey again. “Where there’s a dock, there’s a cabin or a house.”
A trail led from the dock into the woods. The trail widened and climbed with the upwardgoing land. The road opened into a clearing in the forest. Perry, for the first time, pushed hard and passed Harvey and led the way into the open space.
He saw the broken stone chimney. He knew as he saw it that he’d seen it before, in one of the night dreams, in preparation, in a light-headed push-up. It was a broken old chimney fallen from some invisible earlier height. A broken stone chimney that jutted from the snow as the mast of a sunken fish-eaten schooner, a broken stone monument. A tombstone, reverend and presiding. Blinded and fooled. A broken stone chimney. Snow stuffed and snow surrounded. A clearing in the woods occupied by the broken stump of a chimney that had once, maybe never, but perhaps once had released hot black smoke and covered a burning fire and grown hot, the stones growing hot and glowing: just a spindly sawed-off pocked old chimney. Blinded and fooled.
“I think we’ve found our place,” shouted Harvey. The wind was hard.
“What place?”
“Some homesteader’s cabin. Dumb bastard, coming way in here.”
“Yeah.”
“A dumb Finn, I guess,” Harvey shouted against the wind.
“Didn’t last long.”
“Bloody dumb Finn.”
“Let’s stop here. I want to rest here.”
“There’s still some light.”
“I just want to stop and rest here.”
Harvey nodded sympathetically. “All right, buddy.”
“I’m not tired. I just want to stop here. Awhile.”
“Sure thing. It’s a good spot.”
It was comfortable. He had the feeling of civilized content: a chimney, the timbers of the old house comfortably under the snow, the beams and broken panels, the clearing spreading out into the forest. Harvey was busy scrambling for wood, clearing the hearth for a fire, tunneling into the drifts, but Perry was comfortable. It was an old homestead. A meadow hacked from the trees. Maybe farmed for a year and lived on. The dock meant fresh fish in flour. Bleak and comfortable. The warm hearth. He sat on a cleared-off timber. The snow was jagged around the chimney, rolling up and down where the cabin had collapsed. Buried were pots and the stone foundation and a hundred different things of shelter.
Another song. Sung with the snow. Sung by the old man with the snow.
“We’ve got some sardines left,” said Harvey. “What do you think?”
“You know these things.”
“No sense saving them,” he said. “May as well eat them now. We’ll eat them now and have a good rest and see what there is tomorrow.”
“I don’t know much about it, Harv.”
“That’s what we should do.”
“All right.”
“We can fish if we have to.”
“Good idea. What about the ice?”
“There’ll be a way,” he said, beginning to cough. “We’ll see what there is tomorrow.”
A warm hearth, fire merry in the old homesteader’s fireplace with smoke creeping as in olden times up the broken chimney.
The moon was high and curved and bright above the storm, and Perry knew it and saw it, the dock mended and well on an August night, loons swimming underneath and Grace calling for supper from the door.
They woke to the blizzard. Before it had been a snowfall, and then a snowstorm. But it was different. Perry saw it immediately. He even spoke the word as he was waking. A latticework. “Blizzard,” he said.
They huddled against the stone foundation.
After a time Harvey stood against the blizzard and tried kindling the fire in the homesteader’s fireplace. He worked at it a long while then gave up without saying a word. He waded to what would have been a cosy corner of the broken cabin, dug into the snow, stuffed his sleeping bag inside and covered it partly with more snow, then climbed inside and zipped himself shut.
Perry stayed at the chimney. He was warm enough and unafraid. He took a nap, slept hard, and when he woke the blizzard was about the same, a bit tamer, but it was still bad and he slept again.
He woke, his glasses were hopelessly fogged. The torpid soggy memories. The blizzard was very loud and deep. He took off the glasses and slipped them to the bottom of his bag and stared ahead, seeing only a cold hole.
He slept again and then Harvey was shaking him, insisting they get up and walk. Perry closed his eyes but Harvey kept it up, unzipped his bag and pulled him out, and they walked and stamped their feet and waved their arms like hawks. They marched in a circle around the homesteader’s cabin, and Harvey sang marching songs and Perry sang whatever came into mind, his father’s songs. Them Gopher girls are gamey, them Buckeye girls are gay, but them Hawkeye girls with them Hawkeye curls, them’s the juicy kind of lay, and they tramped a path around the broken cabin. Perry’s head was hanging and Harvey was singing marching songs, singing If I die before I wake, pray to God my soul to take; and if I die on the Russian front, bury me with a Russian cunt; and if I die in a combat zone, box me up and ship me home; and if I die before I’m rich, bury me with a British bitch; and if I die locked up in jail, free me quick before I stale; and if I die and turn to mold, smother me in broads and gold; g’left, g’left, g’left-right-left, round and round the broken tombstone chimney, right, left, wading with fullback high strides. Harvey was singing, then coughing, then singing, and Perry’s legs were heavy and the snow was thick. His legs were heavy. His thighs hurt. He was cold, wide open and vulnerable. His tooth hurt, him. He opened his mouth to speak and the wind was drawn in, blowing his cheecks out, forcing back his own stinking breath.
“I’m hungry,” Perry said.
“Just relax.”
“Where are my glasses? Put them down in the bag and they’re gone.”
“You’re better off without them.”
“I need them. Get out and help me look. Harvey.”
“Better off staying inside the bag.”
“I can’t. I have to hav
e them.”
Perry’s throat hurt. Shouting, it had become a natural means of fighting the blizzard. Calmly as possible, thinking it out, he began the search for his glasses. First the bag. He groped methodically through the folds, down deep. Then, removing his mittens and carefully storing them in the bag, he got to his knees and searched the snow immediately surrounding the sleeping bag, working slowly in a circle, moving further out with each sweep. The blizzard had gone mute. It whipped and swirled but had pitched somewhere too high or low or fierce for him to hear. Instead he heard Harvey’s coughing and a later growl as he pulled phlegm from his lungs and spat it out, then a long whining breathing. Perry’s wrists iced. He plunged after his glasses, closing his eyes so that without sight and sound the blizzard was gone and only his wrists and hands were cold.
It seemed to be a nap, or verging on it, but he found his eyes were open. He was propped in his bag against the white chimney. And he was hungry. He sat still, wishing he’d found his glasses. More rotten luck. It was dark enough to be night. It was night.
He got himself up and leaned against the chimney.
The frothing sensation bubbled him all over, a boiling without heat or any sound or light. Harvey’s coughing again. More rotten luck.
Perry leaned forward. Nearsighted, he moved away from the chimney and uncovered Harvey’s bag. He got him up and held him and walked him around the fallen cabin. It was night, Perry was sure of it. They walked without singing. They stopped for Harvey to lean over and cough and spit. Then Perry helped his brother into the bag and covered it with snow, then he climbed into his own bag and forced the zipper to the top and propped himself against the broken stone chimney.
He was certain he was awake, and he blinked to be sure. Inside the bag he smelled himself. Dark and even warm. A cold winter’s morning with oatmeal in the kitchen and his father at the stove in slippers and flannel, Sunday before church. What month was it? Winter. Winter month. It was not 1962, it was winter. It was not October. What time was it? Wintertime. Sunday before church in wintertime was the old man’s quiet time, cooking his own breakfast and letting Paul sleep late, then waking him, the only gentle time, and a very fine time. He was sure the blizzard had passed, for there was not a sound. The old man in flannel and slippers, cracking the door quietly, looking in. It was his time. The old man came in and his eyes were never cold-white on Sunday wintertime mornings, sitting sometimes reading, thinking maybe Paul was asleep. A quiet morning time. He was certain it had passed. That Sunday morning wintertime feeling, wrapped and warm with the Hudson Bay blanket all around him, deep in the bed, the old man reading or getting a yellow-paged sermon ready, checking things, a calm rested look when Paul peeked, peeking in on the old man’s quiet time. The old man’s face ageless and kind at those times. A slipper dangling from a rocking foot, hooked boyish on the toe. Those had been his times.